My beautiful Orkney Re-blogged from 2020.

 

Most days I can walk through the Stromness street of the, ‘best place to live’, and tourist brochure fame and meet the same man, who as a boy taunted and ridiculed a seven year old black foster child who was living with a family in the town. Around 1969.

I don’t blank that man, I say, ‘hello’.

There were very few black people in Orkney when I was young and I knew none. But a ‘black’ doctor saved my 6 month old sister’s life in Aberdeen Royal infirmary. She was rushed there with an incurable illness. So from the age of two I grew up with a knowledge of ‘blackness’ that came from outwith Orkney.

I still did not understand what the term ‘black’ meant.

Ours was a family that stood out as commies, lefties, non church going and ‘dangerous’ to the settled status quo in Orkney. ‘Deep’ Orcadians viewed us suspiciously.

I knew that Paul Robeson was the son of a slave, a Shakespearean actor and singer, and about how the American dream of the ‘land of the free’ was a myth. Paul Robeson sang about Joe Hill, the union organiser who was shot by the ‘Copper bosses’. My uncle confirmed that America was not the propaganda heaven that was sold to us over here, because he had been a seaman on board ships that plied the southern states of America, and he too said he never saw poverty as bad as he saw there. An Orcadian eye witness in my family.

The dancing girls on the sleeve of a Harry Belafonte record transported me to the Kingston Town he sang about and I cast myself as the ‘little girl’ left there. Such was the innocence of my childhood.

It was not a typical Orcadian upbringing.

Us kids loved a jumble sale. The magic of your pocket money actually being able to buy a real thing like a jug or a toy was heady and we never realised that there was any difference between jumble purchases and shop purchases. Indeed, for another time but is there?

The queue for a jumble sale always started early and we lined the sloping hill up to what was the old town hall on Hellihole Road. This was a treat, an outing for us, a social gathering. Among the group was the little boy being fostered with his siblings. Being taken by them to a fun thing to help him feel included and so they all joined the queue. Between me and the foster group was one of the known kid bullies that we were all habituated to be fearful of. Only around nine years old but still that tension was there. His reign of fear preceded him.

The normal bullying was in and out of the playground in the unsupervised places where he knew he wouldn’t be caught. It could be names, it could be demands for sweets, it could be aggressive, threats. He would pick on smaller boys. Girls got shouting rather than physical assaults.

This night he had a glint of glee about him and started singing a racist song as if to the audience of the waiting queue. He kept singing it seeking appreciation from his audience, looking round for affirmation of his performance. He didn’t sing directly to the little boy but that was part of his technique to appear to be ‘only singing’.

I felt myself freeze because I understood everything about this scene.

That there was a little black boy in the queue with his siblings who were younger than me and more timid. That our known bully had a sophisticated repertoire of bullying techniques, tone of voice, choice of language, where it happened and how, and how likely he was to be caught.

I expected and waited for one of the adults in the queue to tell him to stop. None did. I felt the fear and conflict within myself that I was too timid to step in. I didn’t want to ‘attract’ his bullying towards me. I limply hoped that the little boy wouldn’t notice or understand what was happening.

No –one stepped in.

It seemed to go on interminably. The children were silent so the song rang out with his leering, laughing, cruel and provocative chanting. The adults didn’t seem to notice anything.

The singing and taunting only stopped once the queue started to move and the bully was diverted in his rush to get into the scrum and elbo his way to the front.

The bully is a man now. He had a violent alcoholic father who beat his mother. The bully himself grew up to be violent and beat his wife.

I know that he and others like him are all around me in Orkney and harbour within them a toxic legacy of island-ness, that starts with the most simplistic  of  primal racist bigotry that ‘they are different from us because they’re black’. This I have heard said boldly, believed  and without question and extends to anyone that does not fit an unwritten and fluid rule book of secret criteria.

The bully of that jumble queue and others, have never known or experienced the company of black people in enough numbers to simply treat them as other people. All they know are second hand unquestioned versions of ‘strange’ or ‘threatening’ or ‘exotic’  tropes inside their white Orkney. Island-ness means no-one need rub shoulders with others or have their settled prejudices questioned.

The odd teacher or doctor would be an exception in that they would fit the professional mould and be tolerated or even revered in a kind of inverted in-group solidarity, however that acceptance would not translate to embrace a black child or more ordinary black person.

An island is cut off physically and culturally from actual direct exposure to others, so this void is filled by unchallenged stereotypes perpetrated by racist papers like the Daily Mail and The Sun.

I returned to teach in KGS in 1986 after completing my training in Birmingham and not long after the Handsworth race riots there.

To arrive in Orkney after being among a community where the issues of race were real and being tackled daily in schools, where the difficulties for the Afro Carribean and Asian communities took incredible deftness to understand and resolve, Orkney was like returning to a backward outpost of the white colonial world, where racist language was habitually used with no understanding of the bitter context it came from.

So what do you do when you live among racists who don’t understand that they are?

What do you do when children you are teaching are laughing as they pass around mobile phone videos of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners sent to them by their army relatives?

What do you do when you hear new residents say they moved up here because there are no black people here?

I am sad to say I don’t know, but all that is left for me to do is to write about what I see.

When a sweet friend shares an ‘all lives matter’ video showing the beating of a white man by black men in evidence of their assumption that ‘one’s as bad as another’, where do I start to lay out the long and complex history of their own manipulation in the murky face book world?

Or ask me to ‘like’ a post that says  ‘Why, if Churchill was racist  are so many black men called after him?’ This post crafted with a ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it’ self satisfied and righteous,  ‘so there!’.

What do you say when people deny that a racist murder could happen in Orkney?

I cannot go to each one and unpick the history of their misinformation because in truth they are frightened of challenging the comfort of the security of their ideas, handed down by their parents, confirmed by their friends. The safety blanket of prejudices that validate them and cement them securely within a racist circle. They will have to think some uncomfortable things about that friend that passed them that video or that simple sound bite.

All I can do is hope that the bully of the seven year old little black boy will see what I write,  will see the black lives matter sign in my house window as he passes, and maybe for a second feel a prick of unease.